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“... own, hogging the Queen’s Commission and acquiring conscript valets. Trevor Royle, a serious young Scot, describes ‘the National Service Experience, 1945-63’ in his worthy book, The Best Years of Their Lives: he feels sorry that he was too young to meet this challenge himself. By the Sixties all we conscripts had ...”

“... When Robert Stone’s best-known novel, Dog Soldiers, was published in 1974, there was a small but significant overlap of material with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s souped-up, superheated journalistic account of the beginnings of the counterculture, published six years earlier. The coincidence of material was in many ways inevitable ...”

“... This article by Robert Fisk was commissioned by the ‘New Yorker’, who subsequently declined to publish it on the grounds that it was too ‘polemical’ Selma Tawil brought the fifty-year-old keys into the room, sat down in her corner armchair and let them spill out of her hands onto the floor: heavy store-room keys, rusting cupboard keys, keys shaped like backbones for office safes, car keys for an old British-made Hillman, and one larger steel key with a three-and-a-half inch shaft, gun-metal grey with an elegant knot at one end and a broad, worn blade ...”

“... Seif, and her colleagues in the No to Military Trials for Civilians campaign. Six of them, all young women, were arrested at the protest. But the media uproar was so loud that they were all released. When they refused to leave the police station without their male co-protesters, they were beaten, dragged into a truck and dumped an hour south of Cairo in ...”

“... far more enlightening on the origins of Hendrix’s talents. He takes us through the career of a young man, part-black, part-white, part-Cherokee, born in Seattle and deposited in Kentucky – close to the heart of black (and white) American pop – during a spell in the Army. He shows us a sideman playing for Little Richard (‘I want to do with my guitar ...”

“... 17th-century poem of the same title in which ‘Bishop King/Once hymned in tetrametric rhyme/His young wife, lost before her time.’ Porter’s poem begins by acknowledging separation, remorse, confusion and affection: In wet May, in the months of change, In a country you wouldn’t visit, strange Dreams pursue me in my sleep, Black creatures of the upper ...”

“... you with its flash and bluster: The psychiatrist I see during the four weeks I’m back is young and has a beard and drives a 450 SL and has a house in Malibu. I’ll sit in his office in Westwood with the shades drawn and my sunglasses on, smoking a cigarette, sometimes cloves, just to irritate him, sometimes crying. Less than Zero is full of casual ...”

“... that the quality of university education is deteriorating. To get a quality university education young people must leave, but few have the resources to do so. Everywhere I went, I encountered despair about the Palestinian Authority and its effectiveness, even allowing for the tight Israeli constraints. Some 70 per cent of the PA’s revenues goes on salaries ...”

“... many things’, has been summoned by King Minos to find his missing son, Glaucus (in most accounts young Glaucus has fallen into a jar of honey). The play turns on a second request: that Polyidus bring him back to life. When he refuses, Minos entombs him alive with Glaucus. While interred, he learns from two snakes how to use herbs to revive the boy. They are ...”

“... Robert Hughes begins his autobiography, as he began his recent book on Goya, by describing the road accident in Western Australia that nearly killed him in 1999, and his subsequent ordeals in hospital and in court. In this new book he expands on the treatment he received from Australian journalists and in particular on the allegation made by a local reporter that he had referred to a prosecution lawyer descended from Indian migrants as a ‘curry muncher’, which was then repeated by a succession of other journalists ...”

“... brother. The inhibitions, worries and intended – or unintended – slights experienced by the young men of that generation who did not ‘fight’ are now a vanished part of history. Let no one underestimate the traumas that they left. Harold Nicolson’s heyday in the Foreign Office was his work during and after the Peace Conference of Paris. He was ...”

“... in the sparsely intimated erotic dimension of the biblical narrative, is the way the vigorous young Jacob, at last in bed with the woman he thinks is his beloved Rachel, goes at it again and again (‘all that night’), passionately crying out Rachel’s name, until he is disabused in the light of dawn. Saramago is less interested in interpreting the ...”

“... wants to be William Wallace.’ ‘No,’ Martin corrected him. ‘Alex Salmond wants to be Robert the Bruce.’ Wallace has been cast as ‘the people’s champion’, a role he played in the 1975 novel The Wallace by the prolific Nigel Tranter and, twenty years later, in Braveheart. But Martin was right that the appeal of Bruce would be significantly ...”

“... Thwaite’s of Edmund Gosse and, of course, the two recent books on Gerard Manley Hopkins, one by Robert Martin and one by Norman White, but there has been nothing comprehensive. There is now. In Robert Bridges Catherine Phillips tells us everything we could reasonably wish to know about his life. About his poetry there is ...”

“... to forget that Crick ever set it. Nowhere is it more difficult to observe than in the matter of Robert Burns. Long ago, Edwin Muir said that ‘for a Scotsman to see Burns simply as a poet is almost impossible.’ Robert Crawford, himself an admired and graceful poet, writes on the closing page of The Bard that ...”